Contraceptives and taxes

The knives are out for President Barack Obama following his administration’s decision last week not to exempt all religious institutions — such as University of the Incarnate Word, St. Mary’s University and Our Lady of the Lake University, all in San Antonio — from a mandate that they cover birth control as preventive care in their health plans.

This is being decried — even by the liberal E.J. Dionne — as a slam on religious faith, i.e. the Catholic Church, as if the war on religion that presidential candidate Rick Perry claimed was actually occurring.

Here’s what most of the critics — Dionne notably excluded — seem to forget. The Church’s ban on birth control is so iron-clad that it is routinely ignored by Catholics. So, here, the president was being asked to enforce a religious doctrine on the non-Catholics that work for these institutions that even Catholics don’t respect or agree with, if actions are a measure of agreement.

The president is said to have thrown Catholic progressives under the bus with this decision. No, not all. He has stiff-armed some Catholic leadership — notably Archbishop Timothy Dolan, recently named a cardinal. But he has simply spoken to the wishes of Catholics who have already demonstrated that they don’t march in lock step with Dolan or other Catholic leadership on this topic.

Can you imagine the attack from the pulpit? Priest: “President Obama, with this birth control ruling, has shown contempt for the Church.” Congregants, thinking to themselves: “Um. Wait a sec. I use or have used birth control. Why there aren’t 10 kids in the pew with me.”

What this ruling does is afford people who work for Catholic institutions the same right under health care as other Americans. By treating birth control as preventive care, health plan members will essentially be getting the care free or at low cost. No, this isn’t dissing Catholics. It is saying they are equal under the health care law. And that non-Catholics don’t leave their rights at the door when they work for Catholic institutions.

About those Romney taxes.

I had an interesting conversation recently with a friend on the controversy generated by news that presidential candidate Mitt Romney pays a far lower income tax rate than most of us. He gets to do this because most of his income comes from investment or interest-carried income, taxed at about 15 percent, while a lot of folks who get regular wages pay something like 35 percent.

My friend’s argument. Yeah, but even at 13-15 percent, what Romney is paying, millionaires and billionaires pay more than you or I. Even at 15 percent, they are paying millions, while we middle class folks are simply paying thousands.

Um. No.

The fairness has to do with proportion of income paid in taxes and how much is left to spend on the necessities of life. What the current tax code is saying is that millionaires get to keep a larger portion of their income because they and their money are more important. But the fact is that they are still left with so much more of their income than you or I and this would be true even if they are taxed at a higher rate.

This tax policy allegedly frees up more of their money for investments that, in turn create jobs. Sorry, it leaves them more money to pocket because they don’t lack money to invest in the first place. Moreover, is there any argument about who really needs to keep more of their income — the guy who already has vaults full and is sheltering much of it anyway in the Caymans or in Switzerland, or the guy who lives paycheck to paycheck? And talk about stimulative effect. The money that paycheck-to-paycheck guy gets to pocket is guaranteed to get spent. This spending means the kind of demand for products — everything from food, to housing to clothing to a new dishwasher to replace the one broken for months — that creates a whole lot of jobs.